“A great Jewish thinker of the early Middle Ages wondered why God, if He wanted us to know the truth about everything, did not simply tell us the truth about everything. His wise answer was that if we were merely told what we need to know, we would not, strictly speaking, know it. Knowledge can be acquired only over time and only by method.”

Professor Tolkien was both student and professor of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which means that he had forgotten more about poetry and the history of the Anglo-Saxon world than the vast majority of his peers had collectively ever known. Tolkien was, indeed, a classical man.

It is our shared traditions that bind us together, and it is to those traditions we must look for our revitalization. Remembering that there is something good about the world that was will lead us to remember that there is more goodness to remember.

The modern world is stuck in a dysfunctional loop. It began long ago to pursue those things that ruin the soul. The soul, accordingly, began to fall into ruin, and man in response sought more of the same, all the while believing that the reason he had not yet received the happiness he was promised was because he did not have enough of the thing in the first place.

To embrace the truth is to embrace not only tradition, but to submit oneself to the reality that one is not his own god, that there exists something higher than him – a Greater Good. Unfortunately, this flies in the face of the individualist culture that has built up over time.

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What is Further In?

Further In is an independent journal of contemporary thought about very old ideas. We are dedicated to the good, the beautiful, and the true, to exploring matters of culture, liberal learning, moral imagination, faith and reason, science, literature, the arts, history, and simple living. We hope to contribute in our own small way to, as Eliot phrased it, "the redemption of the time." Thus we offer a "politics" of faith, hope, love, grace, gratitude, prayer, and simplicity.